Bulletins

ViacomCBS to launch Paramount+ streaming service for $9.99 a month

The media giant unveiled plans for its upcoming streaming service at a virtual investor event Wednesday, detailing that the service will offer consumers more than 30,000 episodes of TV shows, including 36 original series that are slated to debut this year.

The service will also stream more than 2500 movies, as well as live sports and news. Paramount+ will have over 1000 live sporting events per year, including the PGA Tour, March Madness, the NFL, UEFA soccer matches, U.S. Women's Soccer and more.

Paramount+ will launch on March 4, and effectively become the successor to the company's existing CBS All Access service. The company also plans to launch an ad-supported version of Paramount+ for $4.99 in June that will feature a smaller content bundle.

 Janko Roettgers

Janko Roettgers (@jank0) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.

Latest Bulletins

Coinbase is reeling in its big spending

As many tech companies face a slump and crypto looks set for a deep freeze, Coinbase is facing reality and hitting the brakes on spending. The company is halting some business projects, freezing hiring for two weeks and cutting its spending on Amazon Web Services, the Information reported Thursday.

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AWS privately settles employee discrimination, harassment case

AWS reached a private settlement with a female employee who accused now-former executive Joshua Burgin of discrimination and harrasement, Protocol has learned.

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No one on the FTC wants ed tech to go the way of other online services

The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday unanimously reminded providers of education technology to follow federal limits on the collection and use of kids' data in an attempt to ensure that common practices in the data economy don't become the norm in schools.

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Y Combinator to portfolio founders: 'Plan for the worst.'

The apocalypse is coming, at least according to one of the world's biggest startup accelerators.

Y Combinator sent an email to portfolio founders this week, obtained by TechCrunch, advising the startups to "plan for the worst" as the market turbulence has prompted many companies to initiate layoffs, cost-cutting measures and hiring slowdowns.

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Apple's first AR/VR headset inches closer to launch

Apple just hit an important milestone in developing its mixed-reality headset as rivals like Meta are making strides in developing similar devices. Executives showed off an AR/VR device to Apple's board last week, according to Bloomberg, a sign that the product is really happening and it's inching closer to a public launch.

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The SEC doesn't want Ripple to have these emails

The SEC is pushing back on Ripple’s bid for access to emails and other documents that the crypto giant believes could bolster its case against the regulator.

The SEC, which sued Ripple in 2020 for failing to register $1.4 billion worth of XRP as securities, has refused to release emails related to a 2018 speech by former director William Hinman in which he argued the ether cryptocurrency was not a security. The speech sparked a rally in ether’s price and was interpreted as an endorsement of the industry’s view that cryptocurrencies are not securities.

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Tesla’s Autopilot is under investigation again after a fatal crash

Tesla’s autopilot system is being investigated by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration following a fatal crash in California that killed three passengers this month. It is the 35th accident the agency has investigated since 2016 related to Tesla's Autopilot feature, according to Reuters. Those accidents have resulted in a total of 14 deaths.

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Most Google employees have left Russia

Google has reportedly pulled out of Russia, and many employees there have moved to Dubai.

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that most of Google’s Russia-based employees had chosen to leave the country, and that the company will soon have no workforce presence in Russia amid the country’s ongoing war in Ukraine.

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Everyone is mad about the Commerce Department solar probe

Add lawmakers to the growing list of people, companies and trade groups that are ticked off about the Commerce Department’s solar probe.

This week, a collection of 85 House Democrats wrote to the White House saying that they're concerned “about the devastating economic and environmental impacts” of the probe, which began in April and has already had already stunted the clean energy transition in the U.S. While the probe has not resulted in any changes to the U.S. tariff structure so far, the chance that it could has the industry upset. Lawmakers have heard those concerns, and they're turning up the pressure on the Biden administration to wrap the probe up as quickly as possible.

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The DOJ says it won't prosecute good-faith security research

A major reversal by the U.S. Department of Justice on how it views good-faith security research is expected to be warmly welcomed by the cybersecurity community.

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TikTok is expanding into gaming

TikTok is getting much more serious about gaming, according to a new report from Reuters. The social video platform is already testing mobile games with users in Vietnam, due to the country's high concentration of younger smartphone owners. Eventually, TikTok plans to roll out games more broadly in Asia and possibly other markets as well.

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Top lawmakers are going after Google's online ads business

A bipartisan group of senators wants to force Google to spin off huge chunks of the online ads business at the heart of its profits.

A bill introduced Thursday, led by Republican Sen. Mike Lee, would ban major digital exchanges that match buyers and sellers of online ad space from also operating technology that allows publishers to manage their part of the sales and advertisers to control their purchases. Google is the biggest player in all three areas.

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Twitter goes after 'crisis misinformation.' It's going to get messy.

Twitter will begin taking action against misinformation in crisis situations, the company said Thursday. The new policy will be immediately applied to misinformation surrounding the war in Ukraine.

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Cisco stock plunges after forecasting a revenue decline next quarter

Cisco blamed COVID-19 lockdowns in China and the war in Ukraine for its flat revenue growth during the fiscal third quarter, and forecast for a declining current quarter when it reported earnings late Wednesday.

Supply shortages appear to be the largest culprit, and CEO Chuck Robbins said during a conference call Wednesday that the company’s disappointing revenue was the result of its inability to secure adequate components to sell its various products. The lockdowns in China were especially damaging, Robbins said.

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Block's new bitcoin wallet is for regular folks

Block just detailed plans for its self-custody bitcoin hardware wallet, aiming to bring together the often contradictory goals of convenience and crypto security. Block's goal is to monetize the wallet through a subscription service.

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Apple's loss is Google's gain

Apple's loss is Google's gain: Ian Goodfellow, who was a director in Apple's machine learning division, left the company recently, citing the company's return-to-office policy as the reason for his departure. Goodfellow is reportedly joining Google's DeepMind AI group.

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Gensler rings the crypto-crash alarm bell

SEC Chair Gary Gensler warned Congress Wednesday that consumers and investors are vulnerable in an increasingly volatile crypto market now reeling from a sharp downturn.

Citing the recent collapse in the crypto market's value, Gensler said, “This is a field that is now worth $1.2 trillion. Two weeks ago it was supposedly worth $2 trillion.”

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Tech companies are under investigation for their role in the Buffalo shooting

New York Attorney General Letitia James is launching an investigation into social media companies' role in this past weekend's mass shooting in Buffalo, which the shooter mapped out on Discord for months prior to the attack and livestreamed on Twitch before the video was taken down.

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Salesforce is the latest software company to slow hiring

Salesforce will slow hiring and cut back other expenses, according to a Wednesday report from Insider. The company will join Meta, Netflix, Coinbase, Uber and others that have slowed or frozen hiring in recent weeks.

Per an internal memo, cutbacks will include corporate travel and some upcoming off-sites, Insider reported.

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Elon Musk is furious Tesla got taken off the S&P 500 ESG list

Tesla's cars have helped spur an electric vehicle revolution. But that wasn't enough to stop the S&P 500 from removing the company from its ESG list on Tuesday, leading Elon Musk to call the list a "scam" that has been "weaponized by phony social justice warriors."

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DHS's disinformation board is on pause, following backlash

The Department of Homeland Security has paused work on its recently announced Disinformation Governance Board, according to The Washington Post. The board's director, Nina Jankowicz, has also resigned following an unrelenting stream of harassment. The Post first reported Jankowicz's resignation, and Protocol has since confirmed it.

The board's rollout was shoddy even by DHS Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas' own admission. From the outset, DHS revealed next to nothing about the board's goals or its authorities, leading to concerns that this new entity might be surveilling social media and deciding what does and doesn't constitute disinformation. Conservatives also quickly pounced on Jankowicz, accusing her of being a partisan hack. According to the Post, DHS forbid Jankowicz from saying anything publicly in her own defense.

In truth, the goal of the board, Mayorkas explained far too late, was to do the opposite of what it was being accused of. Throughout DHS, agencies are already working on ways to combat misinformation and disinformation. The purpose of the board was to coordinate those efforts and ensure that they weren't crossing lines with regard to free speech and privacy.

But the decision to do that in a public way rather than in a private audit drew undue scrutiny to the effort. As one source familiar with DHS' plans recently told Protocol, “Having a very large governance board and a really big, public rollout for it with a very well-known person in this space very publicly leading it, that probably drove their risk up a little more than it needed to."

In a statement, DHS spokesperson Angelo Fernandez said the board has been "grossly and intentionally mischaracterized," and confirmed that the Homeland Security Advisory Council is now leading a review of the board in hopes of answering two questions. "First, how can the Department most effectively and appropriately address disinformation that poses a threat to our country, while protecting free speech, civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy. Second, how can DHS achieve greater transparency across our disinformation-related work and increase trust with the public and other key stakeholders," Fernandez said.

The final recommendations are due within 75 days, during which time, the board's work will be paused.

Among the board's critics were not just the usual suspects in conservative circles, but also platform regulation scholars and legal experts who feared that the well had already been poisoned. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos also got in on the act, with Bezos tweeting this week that the "newly created Disinformation Board should review" one of President Biden's tweets about taxing the wealthy to fix inflation.

This story has been updated to include comments from DHS.

Europe has a radical new offshore wind plan

The North Sea is already an offshore wind-power hotspot globally. The European Union is about to take further advantage of the bountiful breeze there in an effort to meet its climate goals and end its dependence on Russian oil and gas.

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TikTok is trying to keep creators around with new attribution tools

Failing to credit original creators will cost platforms users. TikTok has come under fire for this in the past, and it's now trying to keep original creators on the app with new attribution tools.

The platform announced it's rolling out the ability to directly tag, mention and credit a video in the description on Wednesday. TikTok is also adding more prompts to credit original users in the process of posting a video. Once a user creates or edits a TikTok video, they can tap on a tag page and select the content that uses the same sound. That tag will be added as a mention in the video's caption.

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Amazon is being sued for pregnancy discrimination

New York state's Division of Human Rights has filed a complaint against Amazon that claims that the company forces workers who are pregnant and workers with disabilities to take unpaid leave instead of making accommodations for them that would allow them to continue working.

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The graduates are coming: What Gen Z expects out of work

Recent college graduates expect more out of their jobs — approximately $70,000, to be exact.

Recruiting software company iCIMS released its Class of 2022 Report on Wednesday. The latest edition of the annual report examines job trends, career expectations and aspirations of the most recent college grads entering the workforce. Researchers at the recruiting software company surveyed 500 HR and recruiting professionals and 1,000 recent college graduates to better understand their sentiments about workplace expectations.

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Bulletins